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A Tribute to Boston Bombing Victims, a Step at a Time

Elena Barbera is ascending the 294 steps of the Bunker Hill Monument each day for 30 days. She has raised $4,000 so far.Credit
Gretchen Ertl for The New York Times

BOSTON — This city is full of history, but mostly devoid of outsize monuments — there is no Statue of Liberty, no Space Needle. A blinking LED sign for Citgo might be the most prominent landmark in the popular consciousness here, while the city’s storied past is, for the most part, embedded more quietly in graves, buildings and statues visible only when one happens to be near them.

There is an outlier, however, in the Bunker Hill Monument, a stark granite obelisk that rises 221 feet above Breed’s Hill in Charlestown, the old, dense neighborhood north of downtown. These days, Elena Barbera, a writer who has lived in Boston for 14 years, climbs it every morning to look over a city slowly recovering from the Boston Marathon bombings, which, about one month ago, killed three people and injured more than 260.

“I’m not trying to beat any fitness records — I just have to get to the top every day,” said Ms. Barbera, a slight 39-year-old who is ascending the 294 steps of the monument’s stone spiral staircase for 30 days straight to raise money for the marathon attack’s amputees.

It is a modest effort. Ms. Barbera, in part through the Web page www.gofundme.com/2p1048, has collected about $4,000 so far, just a speck compared with the more than $30 million amassed by the One Fund Boston, the main fund-raising effort for marathon victims. Still, she has been joined on some climbs by Bay Staters like Gabriel Gomez, the Republican Senate nominee.

She does not personally know any of the victims, although one of them used to live near her in the city’s North End. But her story is not atypical. She is among many in this relatively small metropolis of about 650,000 who are quietly organizing events, writing cards or preparing meals in the hope of somehow helping their city heal.

“Boston is so connected anyways — it’s real small-town stuff,” said Maria Renda, 43, a longtime friend of Ms. Barbera’s who joined her for a climb on a recent morning. They wound their way, panting, up the dark stone staircase. A class for English-language learners filled the echoey chamber at the top, and the students craned to look out of the small windows that reveal a piecemeal panorama of the city.

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“When you’re up here, you can see all of Boston. You can see the Prudential Center, which is right where all this happened, the bombings occurred,” Ms. Barbera said, describing Copley Square, where another monument, not visible from here, has formed — a makeshift memorial at the marathon’s finish line.

“It’s really close,” she added. “And to look at it, and kind of imagine that it looks so peaceful, and there was such a horrible scene around there.”

She crossed the chamber to another window.

“And then I look out this window, and there’s that building out there — that’s Spaulding Rehab, where a lot of the amputees are being brought,” Ms. Barbera said.

She hoped, she said, that the marathon’s amputees would someday make it up these steps themselves.

“Climbing the monument is out of bounds this week,” she said, “but by this time next year, they could be standing up here.”

A version of this article appears in print on May 16, 2013, on Page A17 of the New York edition with the headline: A Tribute to Boston Bombing Victims, a Step at a Time. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe